Fighting Back (1896 - 1917)

This episode illustrates the early rise of a successful Black middle class and the determination of white supremacists to destroy fledgling Black political power.

The growing oppression had a profound effect on a professor at Atlanta University, W.E.B. Du Bois, and a teenage mail carrier named Walter White. Both would become leaders of a newly founded organization to fight Jim Crow: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. The episode ends with the violence at home giving way to warfare abroad as thousands of Black Americans depart for battle in World War I.

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